HEIGH HO

What would we do without Mark Steyn? He was arguably the one upside to 9/11 and he single-handedly gave Canadians a solitary tenuous link to national self-respect during the Liberal Dark Ages. Not since Paul Johnson has any author so artfully laid bare the concrete reality behind the miasma of abstract platitudes that blinker the West. I will never forget how haunted and enraged I felt when I read him for the first time just days after 9/11 and came across this: “Why do some folks feel the full existential horror of the innocent young secretary incinerated by the photocopy machine, while others see nothing but a vindication of their thesis on Kyoto?”.

This year, America Alone was waiting for me under the tree, and what a ride it is. It is extremely rare to make wit and sarcasm bite through a whole book, but Steyn succeeds. It should be profoundly depressing to read his compelling cases that the West is in terminal social and demographic decline and that there is nothing phobic about Islamophobia, but he is just too funny to allow any gloom to take hold. Is he betting we can laugh our way back to stiffened spines? Would 5th century Rome have held out if the dwindling band of conservative stoics had a Steyn to force them to hoot themselves out of their torpor and into action?

To say the least, his political views are lacking in nuance and there is plenty of room for even hardened conservatives to accuse him of exaggeration, but he is at the top of his game when he skewers the ideological groupspeak of the feckless, self-indulgent Western left. No one–absolutely no one– can make them look as stupid as he does. Here for your morning smile are two excerpts that one might expect would drive some of them to the local monastery in shame, if they were capable of shame that is:

“But what to worry about? Iranian nukes? Nah. that’s just some racket cooked up by the Christian fundamentalist Bush and his Zionist buddies to give Halliburton a pretext to take over the Persian carpet industry. Worrying about nukes is so eighties. “They make me want to throw up...They make me feel sick to my stomach,” wrote the British novelist Martin Amis, who couldn’t stop thinking about them during the Thatcher terror. In the introduction to a collection of short stories, he worried about the Big One and outlined his own plan for coping for a nuclear winter wonderland:

"Suppose I survive. Suppose my eyes aren’t pouring down my face, suppose I am untouched by the hurricane of secondary missiles that all mortar, metal and glass has abruptly become: suppose all this. I shall be obliged (and it’s the last thing I feel like doing) to retrace that long mile home, through the firestorm, the remains of the thousand-miles-an-hour winds, the warped atoms, the groveling dead. Then-God willing, if I still have the strength, and of course if they are still alive–I must find my wife and children and I must kill them.

But the Big One never fell. And instead of killing his wife, Martin Amis had to make do with divorcing her."

* * *
Everyone’s for a free Tibet, but no one’s for freeing Tibet. So Tibet will stay unfree–as unfree now as it was when the first Free Tibet campaigner slapped the very first “FREE TIBET” sticker onto the back of his Edsel. Idealism as inertia is the very hallmark of the movement. Well, not entirely inert: it must be a pain in the neck when you trade in the Volvo for a Subaru and have to bend down and paste on a new “Free Tibet” sticker. For a while, my otherwise not terribly political wife got extremely irritated by the Free Tibet schtick, demanding to know at a pancake breakfast at the local church what precisely some harmless hippy-dippy old neighbor of ours meant by the sticker he’s been proudly displaying decade in, decade out. “But what exactly are you doing to free Tibet?” she insisted. “You’re not doing anything, are you?”

“Give the guy a break,” I said when we got back home. “He’s advertising his moral superiority, not calling for action. If Rumsfeld were to say, ‘Free Tibet? Jiminy, what a swell idea! The Third Infantry Division goes in on Thursday,’ the bumper-sticker crowd would be aghast. They’d have to bend down and peel off the ‘FREE TIBET” stickers and replace them with ‘WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER.’”

Buy the book.